“We are all treasury” ran the old institutional campaign, and whether your name is Juan Español or Rubén Doblas, better known as El Rubius, the most successful YouTuber in our country, you will either keep up with it, or most likely Sooner or later, you will have to be responsible. Whether it’s for a few tens of euros in the VAT return, due to an error when sending a deduction in the personal income tax return or due to the use of what we can call tax engineering to pay less, sooner or later the postman will knock on your door, he’ll deliver a certified letter and you’ll know you now have his undivided attention.

These types of processes can be resolved quickly, which is the case in most cases (especially those where the amounts claimed by the tax authority are lower), but they can take years and are prosecuted. confrontation between El Rubio and the Spanish collector as a result of the way the YouTuber paid taxes on his income in 2013 and 2014.

As you may recall, up until then it was quite common for recipients of a certain amount of income to choose to pay it through corporate income tax, instead of personal income tax. For this purpose it was necessary to form a company, but in exchange all income was taxed at a lower rate. According to many sources, there have been many consultants recommending celebrities of all kinds to opt for this model.

Image: The Daily

However, the tax office at some point began to apply this technique. It has become popular to claim that the AEAT has changed its criteria overnight, while the Agency has confirmed that this was not the case, that this technique of fiscal engineering is not legal and therefore there has been no change in the norm except in the Agency’s zeal to pursue it and sanction. This tightening of control by the AEAT affected all kinds of celebrities, even Joaquín Sabina, one of them, dedicated a stanza to the then sector minister Cristóbal Montor in his autobiographical book “I deny everything”.

Such is the case of El Rubius that, as we can read in ElDiario, began to investigate the tax office in 2015 for diverting a large part of their income through corporate income tax, despite the fact that the companies used for this purpose, first «El Rubius OMG SL» and later «Snofokk», did not accredit the resources (personnel and funds) that would justify their use for such an end.

Now, in a sentence that is final, the justice again agreed with the tax authority and imposed on El Rubius a payment of almost 50,000 euros, which he stopped paying in 2013 using the formula for corporate income tax, and added a fine of 23 000 euros. rather for trying to defraud the public purse. In addition, as we can read in this publication, these amounts refer to the financial year 2013, so we will have to wait to see what happens with the year 2014, in which he repeated this system to pay taxes on his earnings.